While the show is focused on indie, often quirky games – ones that eventually work their way to Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network – we somehow expect Naughty Dog to win an IGF Award for Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. See if we’re right by following along with our live blog below.

IGF Awards

Limbo is the story of a young boy braving a bleak and mysterious world in order to determine the fate of his sister. The art is purely black and white, with the main character and platforming elements silhouetted against beautiful greyscale backdrops.

Today Playdead announces a worldwide release for the game on consoles this year, with an exclusive summer launch on Xbox Live Arcade.

Limbo will be playable at the IGF Pavilion during the 2010 Game Developers Conference next weekend. You can learn about the game at its official site, which includes a video teaser that’s even more impressive than these screens.

Be sure to stay tuned to our Road to IGF coverage for more on Playdead’s Limbo.

Earlier this week iTunes dropped a banner on the front page of the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch download service to promote some of the IGF Mobile finalist and honourable mentions. Well played, Apple.

Touching or clicking on the big orange square brings you to a page with 17 games listed for prices ranging from free to $5.99. Here’s what you can pick up if you’re interested:

Drop 7: $3.99

Guerrilla Bob: $3.99

lilt line: $3.99

MiniSquadron: $3.99

SCVNGR: Free

Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor: $3.99

Stair Dismount: $2.49

Tumbledrop: $2.49

Zombie Pizza: $2.49

Aera: $1.19

Ancient Frog: $5.99

Doodle Jump: $1.19

Earth Dragon: $3.99

iBlast Moki: $3.99

Mind Wall: $1.19

Minigore: $2.49

Pocket God: $1.19

I’ve played Minigore, Doodle Jump, Spider and Drop 7. Which have you played?

And boy are there some good games in the running. Granted, I have little experience of most of them, but I like what I’ve seen of Joe Danger, and I love what I’ve seen of Owl Boy, despite some recent issues the developer’s faced.

The winners will be announced on-stage during GDC on March 11, with $US50,000 in cash up for grabs, including a $US20,000 main prize.

Seumas McNally Grand Prize:

* Joe Danger

* Monaco

* Rocketbirds: Revolution!

* Super Meat Boy!

* Trauma

Excellence in Visual Art:

* Limbo

* Owlboy

* Rocketbirds: Revolution!

* Shank

* Trauma

Excellence in Audio:

* Closure

* Rocketbirds: Revolution!

* Shatter

* Super Meat Boy!

* Trauma

Excellence in Design:

* AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! — A Reckless Disregard For Gravity

* Cogs

* Miegakure

* Monaco

* Star Guard

Nuovo Award:

* A Slow Year

* Closure

* Enviro-Bear 2000

* Today I Die

* Tuning

Technical Excellence:

* Closure

* Limbo

* Heroes of Newerth

* Joe Danger

* Vessel

I wasn’t able to do a dump (not that kind) last week, because Brian Crecente was on holidays. I can only write so many soul-revealing personal posts 24 hours, you know?

But the Dump’s back this week. My notebook’s got some extras.

The IGF Gavel: I’m spending part of my weekend finishing my first round judging duties for the Independent Games Festival. This is something I always want to write more about, but I think judging for VGAs IGF awards and other awards I’m not running is best kept private. Nevertheless, it can have a major influence on what I write based on the exposure it grants me to more games (Being a VGA judge, for example, got me to see Assassin’s Creed II a little earlier than I would have otherwise). As far as the IGF judging goes, I’ve enjoyed doing it each of the past few years, getting a chance to see some wonderful, small, mostly PC games early. I played Braid more than a year before it was released, and World of Goo about half a year before it was out. I’ve played side-scrollers that you control with a Guitar Hero guitar and eventual award-winners such as Blueberry Garden. I don’t want to say much about the 17 first-round games I’m judging this year yet, but just imagine having to judge a game called Don’t Shit Your Pants on a scale of 1-100 in matters such as graphics, design, sound and so on. It’s a fun exercise. Once I’m further into the process and I get the OK, I do hope to turn some of these IGF playing experiences into posts.

EA’s PSN/XBLA Future: I interviewed EA CEO John Riccitiello a couple of Wednesdays ago and published a bunch of articles from it. But not everything. It’s amazing how much you can fit in to a one-hour chat. I still have big chunks of the interview that I didn’t publish. Some of that isn’t post-worthy. Other stuff is good food for thought that I’ll use as a basis for reporting in the future. Here’s a bit I thought I’d get to but doesn’t seem like I’ll be able to advance any time soon. He had mentioned EA’s commercially and critically successful 2009 XBLA and PSN game Battlefield 1943 a couple of times in our chat, and I asked him what his take on that market was. EA had, to the best of my memory, published only one downloadable game for the Xbox 360 and PS3 before that. He said: “We looked at [the XBLA/PSN market] and saw there’s a lot of stuff up there that generates about $US500,000 in terms of revenue. And they’re generally spending $US495,000 to a million in dev. And while that equation is very cool, it’s a hobby, it’s not a business. And while the gamers are having fun with it, they’re not having that much fun with it. And to be honest, how many board games do you want to play on your Xbox? So we looked at that and said, ‘This isn’t being addressed in the right way.’ So we tripled our budget and made something we thought would be really good, with no understanding of what was going to happen. We got a really great outcome with not just highly profitable business but one where consumers far and wide lauded it as a great game. We’re learning from that and there will be more like that.” Got that? More big XBLA/PSN games coming from EA.

Next Year, Already: There’s some other stuff in my notebook about games that I can’t write about yet. Publishers are always setting up new dates to define when a game they’ve offered an early glimpse of can be covered. It’s part of the deal of seeing this stuff in advance. Let’s just say there were games at Sony and Ubisoft events this week that remain under such embargoes. More exciting, though, is that I have preview copies of a trio of 2010 games that I know people will be excited about, and I’ll be able to write impressions of them on Monday, Tuesday and the Monday following. I mention this as a way to show how the years keep churning. I just wrote my last disc-game review of 2009 on The Saboteur and I’m already shifting in to playing major-label 2010 games. Some folks rightfully lament the gaming media’s constant look to the next big thing. It feels like eons since we last covered Halo 3: ODST in any meaningful way, for example, though that game was a big deal, just three months ago. We’re trying to look back a little at least with some of the catch-up reviews we’ve been publishing. Hopefully we’ll find other ways, too, to keep an eye on the games of recent past and the experiences gamers have with them.

Review Addendum: I always jot notes down in my notebook before I write a review, but I realise now that I omitted from my review this week of The Saboteur something that I thought was a telling problem: It takes three button presses to go from in-game action to a pannable view of your full game map. That’s got to be a no-no, no?

Games I Got In The Mail This Week But Didn’t Write About (Yet?): Tekken 6 (PS3 with fancy fighting stick), Hello Kitty Party (DS).

Check for my weekly review round-up a little later, but otherwise, make way for the night and weekend crews!

Entries to the festival are due in both main and student showcase categories by November 2009. The finalists for the main competition will be announced on Jan. 4.

Games selected as finalists will available in playable form on the GDC show floor and will compete for nearly $US50,000 in prizes, including awards for Excellence in Design, Art, the Audience Award and the coveted $US20,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize.

“We’re delighted to return for our twelfth year of the Independent Games Festival, and we’re really looking forward to see what the independent game community comes up with this time around,” said Simon Carless, Chairman of the IGF. “Good luck to all entrants!”

Independent Games Festival [IGF]

Maybe Apple’s iPhone really is “the future of gameplay.” This year’s Independent Games Festival Mobile finalists are almost entirely comprised of titles for iPhone and iPod Touch platforms, with just one Nintendo DS entry appearing.

Two iPhone titles lead the pack of nominations, with tower defence game Fieldrunners and cubic puzzler Edge up for three awards. Of the 14 titles competing in the IGF Mobile finalists, 11 are iPhone and iPod Touch games. On the Nintendo DS side, And-or’s Wardive also scored triple the award noms, competing for Best Game, Innovation in Mobile Game Design and Technical Achievement.

The winners will be announced at the Game Developers Conference Mobile conference on March 24th, then be “additionally honored” during the main Independent Games Festival Awards on March 25th. For the full list of potential winners, read on.

IGF Mobile Best Game
Cubic Republic (IKS Mobile) – Flash Lite
Smiles (Sykhronics Entertainment) – iPhone/iPod touch
Fieldrunners (Subatomic Studios) – iPhone/iPod touch
Edge (Mobigame) – iPhone/iPod touch
Wardive (And-or) – Nintendo DS

Innovation In Mobile Game Design
Wardive (And-or) – Nintendo DS
Galcon (Hassey Enterprises) – iPhone/iPod touch
Eliss (Steph Thirion) – iPhone/iPod touch

Achievement In Art
Fieldrunners (Subatomic Studios) – iPhone/iPod touch
Dizzy Bee (Igloo Games) – iPhone/iPod touch
Ruben & Lullaby (Song New Creative) – iPhone/iPod touch

Technical Achievement
Football Tycoon (Dynamo Games) – Java
Real Racing (Firemint) – iPhone/iPod touch
Wardive (And-or) – Nintendo DS

Audio Achievement
Radio Flare (Studio Radiolaris) – iPhone/iPod touch
Zen Bound (Secret Exit) – iPhone/iPod touch
Edge (Mobigame) – iPhone/iPod touch

Best iPhone Game – Presented by ngmoco
Edge (Mobigame) – iPhone/iPod touch
Dizzy Bee (Igloo Games) – iPhone/iPod touch
Fieldrunners (Subatomic Studios) – iPhone/iPod touch
Zen Bound (Secret Exit) – iPhone/iPod touch
Frenzic (The Iconfactory) – iPhone/iPod touch

The Independent Games Festival today announce the ten winners finalists for their annual Student Showcase awards.

As usual, the finalists include some interesting titles like City Rain, a blend of Tetris and SimCity, and Zeit Squared, a shoot-em-up that allows you to go back in time to assist yourself through the game.

All ten finalists receive a US$500 stipend to help them travel to this year’s Game Developers Conference and the winner will be awards a trophy and US$2,500 cash money.

The finalists:

Tag: The Power Of Paint (DigiPen Institute Of Technology, Seattle)
Feist (Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland)
Winds Of Orbis (Carnegie Mellon – Entertainment Technology Centre, Pittsburgh)
Dish Washington (The National Academy of Digital, Interactive Entertainment, Denmark)
The Unfinished Swan (University of Southern California)
Where Is My Heart? (Universität Ulm, Germany)
The Colour Of Doom (The Guildhall at SMU, Texas)
City Rain – Building Sustainability (Universidade Estadual Paulista, Brazil)
Kid The World Saver (University Of Southern California)
Zeit Squared (Technische Universität Berlin, Germany)

Student Finalists [IGF]

Kyle Gabler, likely riding high on all of the gamer and developer kudos that have been rolling in for World of Goo, is giving away the soundtrack to his game.

The game’s 27 tracks add up to an 85MB zip file. The mirrors are crashing fast, so if you’re interested in getting the music, I’d hop over there pronto.

Here are the track notes to whet your appetite:

1. World of Goo Beginning
This is the main theme of World of Goo, and the first chunk of music I wrote for the game, specifically for our first trailer. I wanted the theme of the game to somehow reflect the song Libertango by Astor Piazzolla, which was the track I used in the original Tower of Goo prototype back in school. Listen for a similar chord progression once the melody kicks in.

2. The Goo Filled Hills

3. Brave Adventurers
A livelier version of Ode to the Bridge Builder.

4. Another Mysterious Pipe Appeared

5. World of Goo Corporation

6. Regurgitation Pumping Station
From a soundtrack I wrote for a friend’s short film about going on a date with the devil.

7. Threadcutter
From one of my small games, Blow.

8. Rain Rain Windy Windy
From a soundtrack I wrote for a short kid’s movie. Writing kid’s music was difficult.

9. Jelly
Music I wrote for a virtual reality world. You are in a subway. And you are a giant banana.

10. Tumbler

11. Screamer
Almost didn’t include this one in the game, but a friend convinced me a few days before we finished. I’m glad he did!

12. Burning Man
Theme I wrote for a friend’s drama/mystery series. I recorded two friends singing single notes, and then I was able to play them back with my keyboard to get a “choir”. This became the theme for “progress” in the game. A variation is used for MOM’s theme.

13. Cog in the Machine
You can hear a clip from this track in one of my other small games Robot and the Cities Who Built Him

14. Happy New Year ™ Brought to You by Product Z
Recorded some great singers from Carnegie Mellon. This is the first time the “what’s up there anyway” theme can be heard. You can hear the same theme in the tracks Years of Work and The Last of the Goo Balls.

15. Welcome to the Information Superhighway
I wrote this one back in high school, which makes me feel old. You can hear a nod to phantom of the opera in a section of the organ part. I had forgotten this song existed, and was glad to find it burned onto an old rotting cd-rom. I think this was the first time I ever recorded someone singing. Only the second half of this clip is used in the game.

16. Graphic Processing Unit

17. Years of Work

18. My Virtual World of Goo Corporation
Originally written for a friend’s NES game Dikki Painguin.

19. Hello, MOM

20. Inside the Big Computer

21. Are You Coming Home, Love MOM

22. Ode to the Bridge Builder
This was the second track I wrote for the game. The goal was to make a variation on Amazing Grace, in the style of those old western soundtracks by Ennio Morricone.

23. The Last of the Goo Balls and the Telescope Operator

24. Best of Times
This has become the unofficial second theme to World of Goo, after we used it in our second trailer. I originally wrote this for an animated short film I made with some friends. I recorded a bunch of performers all huddled around a single microphone in my bedroom to get the layers used in this track. Drums were made by banging on chairs and cardboard boxes.

25. Red Carpet Extend-o-matic
I wrote this in 2001 as a joke for a music class in undergrad. Only the beginning of this song is used in the game, and for only one level, but it has become one of the most requested pieces of music. So, here’s the “full song”, but it comes with a warning – this song is designed to sound like every cheap 90’s dance song ever made. The singer is great though, an astrophysicist named Jessica. I gave a her a chainsaw for her wedding and we never spoke again. The end.

26. World of Goo Corporation’s Valued Customers

27. World of Goo Ending
Main theme to World of Goo, and used in our third and final trailer.

World of Goo Soundtrack

After the roaring success of last week’s inaugural Flash Friday, I decided to launch another weekly post, this time pointing you towards an excellent downloadable indie game. And because alliteration is hard, it’s called Indie Tuesdays.